Page Created: 2006 December 14
Page Last Updated: 2011 December 13
Welcome to Starlight Cascade Observatory Night AllSky Live CONCAM Page!
Near Yarker, Ontario, Canada. (44.22.39 N 76.45.47 W    151M Elevation)

AllSky ConCam

The CONCAM (CONtinuous CAMera) allsky monitoring project was started in 1999 by Robert Nemiroff at Michigan Tech. Nightskylive.net is the home page, displaying images of the live night sky from around the world.
The allsycamera system here at SCO (running since 2006 December ) consists of an SBIG ST237A camera (parallel port and control box interface) with an integrated wide angle lens, placed inside placed inside a 30cm acrylic dome, taking 90 second exposures all night long. The previous system consisted of a downward looking PC Supercircuits low light camera and a reflective hemispherical mirror - the system sensitivity was not good. The old system barely picked up all of the stars in the Big Dipper. The new system routinely picks up the Milky Way Galaxy

Most Recent Special Events

2011December12 Fireball low in the west south west at 23:04:42 UT (18:04:42 EST)
before during after all in 90 second exposures.
Here are the three images integrated into an animated .GIF (561kb)
More special images

Relatively realtime data

If any of these images are empty, this generally means that the system was not active the night before or that image processing has gone wrong :)
Current Image: Feb 4 08:40 current.jpg Latest animated gif: 67454559 Feb 4 08:05 today.gif Weather Underground PWS IONTARIO51
Latest jpg: (normally the last image of the run)
Feb 4 08:40 current.jpg 		Latest days images
#images today: 449
Complete Image Archives of:
Allsky Camera .JPGs stored in folders by date (since 2007).
Complete Animated .GIFs #gifs: 683
Event Log
  • 2012Jan19 - indications of failing network cable to observatory, especially in cold (-20) weather. Will wait for good connection on warm day, transfer over images from local observatory storage and reprocess manually.
  • 2012Jan11 - removed .mpg generation of large .gif as it was overwhelming the old slow processor on the web server and locking up the whole site for an hour each day. total combined parallel heater resistance=33ohms@24vdc giving 17 watts of heat.
  • 2011Dec16 - broke the main processing script on Dec 13 and just repaired this morning
  • 2011Dec04 - replaced the dome and platform, replaced circulation fan with a larger one and mounted it inside the dome, remounted the two resistive heaters.
  • 2011Nov04 - fixing some of the code for archiving images and animations.
  • 2011Sep28 - added new "slide show" method of displaying the nights run of images, in addition to keeping the old one.
  • 2011Sep19 - now annotating CCD Temp in Deg C, and now exposure time! CCD temperature starts out at about 17- -11=28degC below ambient. By the end of the nights run it is 12- -11=23degC. This has improved slightly since the housing vent was installed. The first image of the night shows the camera at ambient.
  • 2011Sep18 - removed housing door and installed vent with insect screen as camera was often 5-10 degrees C above ambient at the start of the nights run.
  • 2011Sep16 - change startccd time from 00:30 UT to 00:01 UT
  • 2011Aug02 - problems on the last two nights runs. should be fixed for tonight... just as the clouds come in :)
    2011Jun19 - close to solstice, changed start times to 01:59UT (21:59EDT) as camera is oversaturating and process the last images at 08:00UT (04;00EDT)
    2011May13 - startCCD time has been 01:19 UTC (21:19 EDT) and stop time 08:23 UTC (04:23 EDT) for some time now and even then the start and end are overexposing. Problems with the parallel skypipe software interfering with ccdops seem to have been resolved as well.
    2011Mar26 - changed StartCCD time to 00:30 UTC (20:30 EDT) and stop time to 10:00 UTC (06:00 EDT)
    2011Feb22 - changed StartCCD time to 23:45 UTC (18:45 EST) and stop time to 11:15 UTC (05:15 EST)
    2011Feb15 - changed processing scripts a bit to lighten the images as they had become too dark since migrating over to the laptop. Changed startccd time to 18:32 EST changed STOP time to 06:04EST
    2011Jan13 - another laptop (7 years old) installed with all software and allsky now up and running again.
    • Image Archives of:
    Allsky Camera .JPGs stored in folders by date. #days/folders: 41
    Animated .GIFs #gifs: 683
    There is a 18watt wire wound resistor heating the dome interior powered by a 24VDC wall adapter controlled by a mechanical timer running only from 18:00-06:00 local time. The dome has two vent holes in its base where a small computer muffin fan (1 watt) runs 24/7, providing circulation into the lower housing which holds the camera, cables and connection points. The USB 5m active repeater is not in use at this time. Bugs do get into the housing which needs to be sealed better. Images are captured by CCDOPs software running on a Windows XP workstation saving the images to a linux file server. The camera and the heater shutdowns down near sunrise and starts up before sunset and runs on a mechanical 110vac timer.
    Our latest system went live in 2006 December.

    More Special Images

  • 2011December12 Fireball low in the west south west at 23:04:42 UT (18:04:42 EST)
    before during after all in 90 second exposures.
    Here are the three images integrated into an animated .GIF (561kb)
  • 20110410 Big! Fireball western bound before during after
    all in 120 second exposures.
  • 20090824 Fireball near Arcturus at 20090824_2115_38 EDT in a 120second exposure
  • 20090718 ISS & Shuttle 120 sec exp
  • 20090617 Meteor? near Vega 120 sec exp, No ISS, no Iridium flares at this time.
  • 20090508 ISS Pass Mag -2.2, alt 81deg plus flaring
  • 20090511 ISS Pass Mag -1.5, alt 50deg
  • 20090413 Moon rising above light shield at an altitude of 12 degrees.
  • 20090316 ISS1 and ISS2
  • 20090218 meteor
  • 20090216 Venus Low flying aircraft aircraft Leo and Saturn
  • 20081222 Frame 1 Frame 2 of an interesting lighted pass of some object, probably low flying aircraft at 23:19:05 to 23:22:25 local. 180 second exposure each.
  • 20081223 Video with updated annotation (27mb) animated .GIF
  • 20081124 First video with working annotation (28mb) animated .GIF
  • 20080220 Total Lunar Eclipse 2008 February 20 (7mb) animated .GIF

    Development Log

  • 20110907 - applied coat of rainx to dome. looks pretty scummy and full of dead wasps :) Placed laptop and power supply into environmental box for the winter.
  • 20110805 - added vent to allsky camera housing to let it cool more during the night.
  • 20110301 - moved the software system off a desktop workstation inside the environmental box in the observatory shed to an 8 year old laptop now inside the observatory. This helps for power and temperature considerations.
  • 20100330 - still working automatically with little or no user intervention. We prepared a talk on the actual amount of clear skies weather wise based on 2.5 years of this cameras operational data and presented it to the RASC-KC in March. Now looking at changing the 120sec exposures to something less... say 60 sec. Why? Whenever cloud or moon is in the field, it tends to be way overexposed.

    ToDo List

  • calibrate dome/camera alingment after rebuild 2011dec13
  • check heaters

    References

  • North American All-sky Camera Database
  • Heavens Above Main Site
  • ISS Pass Predictions for Kingston Ontario
  • Iridium Flare predictions for Kingston Ontario (highly localized!)

    AllskyCam reference info

  • USask
  • UWO
  • NYAA
  • Cloudbait Observatory Allsky camera
  • Moonglow
  • SBIG
  • IRF
  • Sodankyl
  • Vandenberg AirForce Base